The Normalisation of Cyber Bullying

Cyberbullying has become a normal practice and it’s all our fault. Parents, teachers and school administrators have completely dropped the ball on this one. Cyberbullying is a significant issue and it requires all its stakeholders to assume responsibility and work together. We must focus on this issue before it gets even worse:

More than half of children and young people in England accept cyber-bullying as a part of everyday life, a new survey has found.

But parents and teachers say they do not feel they are equipped to deal with the growing problem of internet abuse.

Campaigners warned that cyber bullying had become ‘an everyday problem for today’s children’ and demanded better education to tackle the phenomenon.

More than half of children polled – 55 per cent – said cyber-bullying had become a part of life for children and young people, while 60.5 per cent of parents also said it had.

Keeping their children safe online is a major worry for parents, with 49 per cent complaining that the amount of access their child has to the internet leaves them struggling to monitor their behaviour online.

And 51 per cent say this makes them scared for the safety of their child.

However, the poll suggests that many families would struggle to respond if their child did fall victim to internet abuse.

Some 40 per cent of parents said they would not know how to respond if their child fell victim to cyber-bullies or how to set up filters on computers, tablets and mobile phones that could protect their children.

There were growing calls for online safety to be taught in more schools, with 69 per cent of teachers and 40 per cent of young people calling for it to be included in the national curriculum.

Nearly half of teachers – 43 per cent – admitted their school did not currently teach anything about cyber-bullying and online safety and 44 per cent admitted they did not know how to respond to cyber-bullying.

Almost a third – 32.1 per cent – of young people said that teaching schools, parents and children about internet safety would be the biggest step that can be taken to tackle cyber-bullying, yet just a fifth of children felt they were taught enough about it at school.

The major new survey, commissioned by the Anti-Bullying Alliance, underlines the struggle many families face trying to protect their children on the internet.